Page 45 - Delaware Medical Journal - September/October 2018
P. 45
PRACTICE MANAGEMENT
points of frustration for patients, says Joe
& Morgan.
• Ask your staff. They may already
know where your problem areas are. Try convening a meeting and getting staff feedback on what your practice could do to improve customer service, says Hertz.
STEP 2: Design your training
Now that you know what’s wrong, you can
• Prioritize. If your practice is large enough, you may be able to bring in a consultant to help you rank the most important issues to train on and design
a curriculum. In a smaller practice, you could put your heads together with a trusted manager to see what issues everyone needs help with, and which employees might need a one-on-one training, says Hertz.
• Share key customer-service tenets with everyone. Some of the most important
customer-service lessons should be shared in group trainings to ensure they permeate your culture going forward. They might include always looking patients in the eye when talking to them, developing a polite phone greeting, acknowledging patients with a smile when they enter the practice and using their names to make them feel at ease, says Hertz.
• Design individual follow-ups around job descriptions.
some employees need different or more in-depth training than others. Take a look at these employees’ job descriptions, Capko suggests. What are they doing most often? And how do those tasks intersect with the
STEP 3: Keep customer service top of mind
If you want customer-service training to succeed in the long term, you’ll need to get your staff’s buy-in:
• Reward good service. You might consider giving out quarterly bonuses or gift cards to employees who are providing particularly good service to patients — based on your own or a practice manager’s observations, or on direct patient feedback about the employee, says D’Souza.
• Retrain. Take advantage of regularly scheduled staff meetings to remind employees of key customer-service tenets you would like them to follow. Also maintain buy-in by soliciting suggestions for better service on an ongoing basis, suggests Hertz.
•
to employees. Let staff members know that you’re not focusing on customer service
just to make patients happier, but also as a way to improve their work days, suggests Capko. “A lot of times, employees only hear negative feedback. If they hear that you’re here to make their lives easier, that’s a whole different way of framing the situation.”
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